Why I won’t be doing that video interview about open access

Recently I was contacted by Library Journal (LJ) in connection with a series of video interviews it is conducting with open access “VIP’s and leaders”. The first interview – with the Director of Harvard University’s Office for Scholarly Communication Peter Suber – has already been published. Would I have some time to do an interview myself, I was asked? The project is for a new section of LJ’s web site sponsored by the open access publisher Dove Press.

I liked the idea of doing a video interview but I was instinctively shy of being associated with a project that has a large Dove Press banner on the top right hand corner proclaiming it to be the “exclusive sponsor” of the site, along with a list of featured articles with “Sponsored by Dove Medical Press” in prominent red ink strapped across the top of each one. I felt that taking part would amount to endorsing Dove Press, which for reasons I will explain below I did not want to do.

I emailed LJ back to say I was not comfortable with doing an interview for a site sponsored by Dove Press, and asked whether it would consider posting any such video elsewhere on the LJ site. Strangely, I received no reply to this. As I was now intrigued as to how this site had come about, who had suggested the idea, and what its purpose was I also emailed LJ’s Managing Editor. To this too I received no reply.

So what are my reservations about being associated with Dove Press? There are a number of issues here, including a discomfort with the publisher’s marketing and PR activities, a concern with its editorial processes, some puzzlement over its lack of transparency, and a suspicion that its commitment to open access is not as deep as I would like.

Let’s be clear, while somehave accused Dove Press of being a “predatory” publisher, I am making no such claim here. Nor could I, since I don’t have sufficient information to make a judgement either way. I am just stating the reasons why I personally do not want to be associated with the company.

Marketing and editorial

What is indisputable is that Dove Press has a somewhat controversial history. When it started out in 2008, for instance, it was criticised for spamming researchers. Its fiercest critic at that time was Gunther Eysenbach, who in 2008 wrote a blog post about Dove Press (plus fellow NZ-based publisher Libertas Academica) entitled “Spammer of the Month”.

Around that time, I interviewedDove Press’s Publisher Tim Hill. As part of that interview I asked him about the company’s unsolicited emailing campaigns. He replied that these were all perfectly legal and that Dove Press had in any case ceased emailing researchers.

There is no reason to doubt this. I haven’t noticed any complaints recently. On the other hand, it might be that spam messages from open access publishers are now so commonplace, and so apparently unstoppable, that researchers no longer even comment on such activities.

By then, in any case, Dove Press’s marketing strategy seems to have changed, with the company becoming a frequent sponsor of events – e.g. here, here and here. Sponsorship is, of course, widely practised by scholarly publishers these days, and some may say it is unremarkable. But not everyoneis comfortable with it, especially when it involves large powerful companies like Elsevier. Either way, Dove Press’s exclusive sponsorship of part of LJ’s web site seems to me to be a top-heavy approach to sponsorship.

There have also been complaints from other publishers about Dove Press launching “copycat” journals that confuse authors over their provenance. In 2010, for instance, a New York publisher told me that it had had to exert a great deal of pressure on Dove Press to get it to change the name of a couple of journals it had launched with identical or near identical titles to existing journals Maybe this is no more than the cut and thrust of business competition, but many might feel it not to be in the spirit of open access.

In addition, Dove Press has faced criticism over its editorial processes. In February 2010, for instance, a 45-year-old biology professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alabama in Huntsville called Amy Bishop shot dead three of her colleagues and wounded three others after being denied tenure. In reporting on the killing, journalists quickly discovered that one of Bishop’s research papers had been published by Dove Press, and that she had named her own minor children as co-authors of the paper.

When I emailed Hill to ask him about this he replied, “We do ask that all co-authors be cited in any paper sent to us. Dr Amy Bishop was the corresponding author of this paper. Her paper (‘Effects of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors on motor neuron survival’) was peer-reviewed by 3 experts and revised by Dr Bishop prior to an editorial decision to accept the revised paper for publication.” He added: “It appears, on the basis of media reports, that she [Bishop] was in breach of our authorship criteria.”

This explanation by no means satisfied everyone, and since Dove Press was at that time a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) the criticism was directed at OASPA too, with demands that it investigate the activities of Dove Press (e.g. hereand here).

Concern about Dove Press’s editorial processes was further heightened in October 2013, when Science journalist John Bohannon conducted his now infamous “sting” in which he sent out a fatally flawed paper to 304 open access publishers. One of those to accept the flawed paper was Dove Press.

Commenting on the incident on the OASPA web site, Eysenbach said, “[H]ow much longer will this publisher be allowed to tarnish the reputation of open access and OASPA? How about three strikes and you are out?”

This time OASPA did investigate Dove Press. Its conclusion: “there was a lack of sufficient rigour in editorial processes” at the journal concerned (Drug Design, Development and Therapy). As a result, OASPA terminated Dove Press’s membership in November 2013

Dove Press has also featured a number of times on the Retraction Watch site. In 2014, for instance, the site reported on the retraction of a Dove Press paper following heated media criticism of claims that green coffee bean extract could help people lose weight. This led to the authors of the Dove Press paper issuing a retraction note that said the “sponsors of the study cannot assure the validity of the data”. The US Federal Trade Commission also investigated the matter, and this led to a settlement in which a Texas-based company was required to “pay $3.5 million, and to have scientific substantiation for any future weight-loss claims it makes.” (See also here).

And in 2014 a researcher complainedthat Dove Press’s peer reviewer form did not offer reviewers an option to reject papers.

It is therefore unsurprising that Dove Press at one time featured on Jeffrey Beall’s list of “Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers”. In April 2010 Beal also included Dove Press and Libertas Academica (the latter, claimed Beall, was a Dove Press brand rather than a separate company) in a comparative review he published in The Charleston Adviser entitled “Predatory” Open-Access Scholarly Publishers.

And it is unsurprising that Dove Press’s membership of OASPA has been an on/off affair. The publisher joined OASPA in late 2009, but withdrew on 7^thApril 2010. It applied again in May 2012, and was accepted on 12^th July 2012. As noted, following the Sciencesting it had its membership terminated by OASPA (on 5^th November 2013). But it applied again in June 2015 and was accepted back into the organisation on 23^rd September 2015. Dove Press is currently still a member of OASPA.

The publisher is also no longer on Beall’s list, and it is currently a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

Transparency

Personally, I also feel there is insufficient transparency at Dove Press. When I interviewed Tim Hill in 2008 I asked him who owned the company. In response he would say only that it was “created by a group of former publishing executives, mostly from ADIS International” (now part of Springer), and that the company was owned by “six private individuals.”

And I believe that OASPA asked for too little information about the ownership of Dove Press when the publisher first joined.

Here the discussion becomes a little entangled with Libertas Academica. Since commentators like Beall and Eysenbach were claimingthat Libertas Academica and Dove Press are the same company I also asked Tim Hill what if any connection there was between the two companies. Hill replied, “There is no connection other than a familial one. My son, Thomas, owns and operates Libertas Academica.”

A year later I interviewedson Tom Hill, whose LinkedIn profile lists him as being the Publisher and CEO of Libertas Academica. When I asked him who owned the company he declined to say, on the grounds that it is a “privately held company”. And while he was willing to say that he personally had an ownership stake in the company he declined to say what that was. When I asked him if his father had an ownership stake in Libertas Academica, or any involvement in the company, his reply was a simple “No”.

When the Amy Bishop killing took place I did some research on New Zealand Companies House. This suggested to me that Tim Hill didhave a stake in Libertas Academica. In fact, the records indicate that it was Tim Hill who in 2004 registeredthe company, and who was at that time the sole shareholder and director. When I spoke to Tom Hill in 2009, his father Tim still appeared to be registeredas a shareholder, as were Tom Hill, Ann Shirley Hill, and a couple of trusts.

In 2010 I emailed both Hills and asked them to clarify the situation. Tim replied that I had no legitimate business to ask the question, but added, “In light of your continued pursuit of this private matter I have checked with my lawyers and note that my initial directorship of Libertas had not been cancelled as they were instructed to do in 2005. This has now been done and Tom is the only director of Libertas Academica … [and] … I confess, yes, I personally own 1% of Libertas Academica.”

He went on to say, “Our Family trust owns several assets including equity in publishing companies, real estate etc.”  He added that he had nothing to hide and always tried to be open, but “I draw the line at my personal financial and tax arrangements”.

And he ended his email: “Henceforth I will not be providing you with any comment or information on any subject.”

The response from son Tom Hill was similar. Initially he did not reply to my email, so I sent him a reminder – to which he replied, “I have no comment to make on your earlier email. Please cease immediately and permanently sending any further emails to me on this or any other matter.”

Personally, I felt these to be excessive responses to my question. I certainly wasn’t seeking any tax information, and since I had only asked the question twice (with a two-year gap between) I fail to see how it could be classified as “continued pursuit”. Moreover, as the ownership details of New Zealand and UK companies are held in a freely available public database I don’t see how this kind of information can be classified as private.

Be that as it may, New Zealand Companies House records that Tim Hill did resign his directorship in Libertas Academica, on 22^nd February 2010. However, he still appears to have had a shareholding in the company in June 2011, before being finally removed from the register in June 2014. It may be that I am misreading the Companies House data. If so, I apologise to both Hills in advance. My problem is that they have boycotted me, so it difficult to check facts with them.

Does it matter?

But does Tim Hill’s involvement with Libertas Academica have any relevance to this discussion? Some might feel it does, not least because during the period he was a director/shareholder of Libertas Academica this publisher too experienced a number of controversial incidents. In 2008, for instance, there were complaintsabout a paper published in a Libertas Academica journal called Theoretical Biology Insights. The concern was that the paper appeared to suggest that the complete state of all human brains might somehow be encoded in the Earth’s magnetic field.

Responding to the criticism, Tom Hill explainedthat the paper had been inappropriately published as a result of “a database error caused by a server upgrade.” The paper subsequently disappeared, but what exactly happened is not clear today as at some point the journal itself disappeared – although there is an echo of it in the Internet Archive, and a blank Editorial Board page here. Again, since I have been boycotted by Tom Hill I cannot seek clarification from him.

However, aware that Libertas Academica is a member of the archival service CLOCKSS I contacted them. A spokesperson informed me that since a “trigger event” never took place the journal was not archived at CLOCKSS. “In the case of Theoretical Biology Insights, my guess is that we were not aware of its existence,” he said. “If we had been aware of it, I think we would have asked Libertas about triggering it. In principle a CLOCKSS-participating publisher should archive all of its journals in CLOCKSS; in this case, that didn’t quite happen, but our preference would have been that Libertas archived it with us and then we had triggered it.”

In any case, the spokesperson added, “No DOIs for the journal are registered in CrossRef. DOIs are a reference point for journals to meet a certain level of credibility, which this journal did not have.”

Subsequently, in January 2010, I was contacted anonymously by someone complaining that one of Libertas Academica’s journals – Autism Insights – was being used as a vehicle to propagate the ideas of the discredited medical researcher Andrew Wakefield. To this end, the anonymous informant said, its editorial board was dominated by members of Wakefield’s Thoughtful House Center for Children, and included Wakefield himself. As the informant contacted me just prior to Tom Hill boycotting me I emailed Hill for a response. He replied that the journal’s EiC did not wish to respond to the allegation, and neither did he.

While Autism Insights is no longer published the back issuesare available on CLOCKSS. However, the list of editorial board members appears to have disappeared. “I am afraid,” the CLOCKSS spokesperson told me, that “the publisher did not provide us an Editorial Board for archiving.”

Ownership and management of Dove Press

But let’s return to Dove Press. As noted, in 2008 Tim Hill declined to say who owns the company. In terms of senior management, the publisher’s website currently states: “Philip Smith and Kevin Toale are the Executive Directors based in the UK, and Tim Hill is the Publisher based in New Zealand.”

What about its locations? Dove Press’s New Zealand registered address is that of a chartered accountancy in Auckland (the same address as for Libertas Academica). Dove Press’s UK registered address is 97 Judd Street in London, and its web site indicates that the address for the editorial office is a PO Box in Corinthian Drive Albany, Auckland. The head office is at Beechfield House in Macclesfield, Cheshire.

It is not easy to make contact with the UK executives as their email addresses do not seem to be available. The couple of times I tried to call the head office I got an answer machine. There is a contact form on the web site, but I assume this is fed to Tim Hill, who has said he will not respond to any further messages from me. Dove Press’s membership details on the OASPA site dooffer an email address (publisher@dovepress.com). Again, however, this presumably goes to Tim Hill.

Elsewhere, Dove Press’s About Pagelists a “Medical Director” called Scott Fraser, who is a Consultant in the North East of the UK. Again his email address is not provided, but in 2010 I did manage to locate his institutional email address and emailed him there. My message went unanswered.  

Tim Hill’s unwillingness to give me information about the ownership of Dove Press seems odd in light of the fact that it is freely available in public databases. New Zealand Companies House, for instance, reveals that Dove Medical Press (NZ) is majority owned (99%) by UK-based Dove Medical Press Limited (with 1% held in the name of Ann Shirley Hill).

UK Companies House lists 5 current officers of Dove Press and 8 shareholders. The shareholders include The T & A Hill Family Trust, Kevin Toale, and Philip Smith. Another shareholder is Graeme Peterson. Peterson is also recorded as being the Managing Director and Company Secretary of Dove Press.

On his LinkedIn page Peterson describes himself as an experienced healthcare professional and CEO and MD of The Prime Medical Group, a company, he says, that partners with pharmaceutical clients “to create and deliver medical education and communication programmes with global, regional or national implementation.” I take this to mean that it is a medical education and communications company (MECC).

Prime Medical Group has a number of associated businesses, including Prime Medica, Core Medica, Only Oncology, and Prime HealthCare Ltd, all based in Knutsford, Cheshire, and all of which seem to be in the MECC business. Peterson’s various directorships can be viewed here.

I could find no mention of Dove Press on Peterson’s LinkedIn page. I was also unable to find any mention of him on the Dove Press web site. To try and establish why, I sent a LinkedIn contact request to Peterson, a request he accepted. I followed up with a question about Dove Press but had received no reply by the time I posted this.  By doing a number of web searches I eventually discovered an email address for Kevin Toale. My message to that address remained unanswered at the time I published this.

Other Dove Press shareholders listed in the company’s Annual Return include JSI Communications, a company owned by one of the Dove Press directors, John Stolz. On his LinkedIn pageStolz describes himself as a former medical writer for ADIS International. JSI, he explains, plans and implements medical writing projects on behalf of pharmaceutical company clients. In 2005 Stolz was describing himself as Commissioning Editor for Dove Press.

Also listed as a Dove Press shareholder is William Dolben, whom I take to be the founder and CEO of Content Ed Net, a company that describes itself as the second largest seller of reprints to the global pharmaceutical industry. On his LinkedIn page, Dolben says he is a former ADIS and Wolters Kluwer Exec VP.

As noted, Tim Hill expressed the belief that I have no legitimate reason to ask him about the ownership of Libertas Academica, and he refused to say who owns Dove Press, presumably because – like his son – he viewed it to be private information.

However, in many countries (including the UK and New Zealand) the law requires that this information is supplied to a relevant government agency, which in turn has to make it available for public inspection. In the UK, this information is required under the Companies Act 2006. As Companies House explains, making this information public does not conflict with the Data Protection Act because “personal data is exempt if the data controller is duty bound to make it available to the public.”

Indeed, company information has itself become open access in many countries. This means there is now no charge to view it online, and it can be linked to directly – e.g. hereand here. Perhaps in recognition of this in 2015 Dove Press included a link to Companies House on its About page. (The link was not there up until 2014).

Beyond that, it seems to me that since the bulk of their revenue comes from the public purse there is an onus on scholarly publishers (even if private companies) to be transparent about both their ownership and their finances. There is also a view that in committing to open access, a publisher should be presumed to have committed to greater openness in all aspects of its business. As publishing consultant Joe Esposito has put it, “Let’s be open about open access.”

But what is most puzzling to me is why simply asking for ownership information led to a journalist (me) being boycotted by a publisher, with the publisher saying that he will not provide that journalist with any further comment or information about anything!

What level of commitment to open access?

All of which leads me to a final question: how committed is Dove Press to open access? Certainly its attitude to licensing suggests it is not as committed as OA advocates might like. For instance, where OA advocates believe that the norm for open access should be use of the CC BY licence (and indeed OASPA “strongly encourages” its use), Dove Press insists on using the CC BY NC licence. While the copyright appears in the name of the authors of papers, the licensing information says, “Permissions beyond the scope of the License are administered by Dove Medical Press Limited.” In other words, Dove Press is able to earn money on top of the fee it charges authors to publish their papers, none of which I assume finds its way back to the authors.

Doubtless for this reason, on its permissions page Dove Press expressly prohibits a number of uses of the content it publishes, unless further payment is made. And presumably in order to ensure this, its articles all include a link to the Copyright Clearance Center’s permission form.

After playing around with the CCC permission form it seemed to me that if a business wanted to print out and photocopy on high quality paper a 9-page Dove Press article in order to, say, mail it to 200 doctors, the cost would be $13,803.50 (or $ 69,003.50 for 1,000 doctors). This is income, remember, that Dove Press can earn on top of the $2,310per paper that it charges authors in order to make their work open access.

It is also worth pointing out that although Dove Press implies – both on its own website and on the LJ web site – that it is celebrating 10 years of commitment to open access this is not strictly accurate. When I spoke to Tim Hill eight years ago he told me that the company was conceived as a subscription business, not an open access publisher, and it was at that time still selling subscriptions, and charging users pay-per-view fees of $59 per paper.

Finally, with many now calling for open peer review, some might feel Dove Press’s single blind peer review process to be a little out of keeping with the spirit of the times. Dove Press reviewers (who can vary from 2to 4) are not named, and the reviews remain secret.

Let me stress once again that I make no claim about the probity or otherwise of Dove Press. I am working on the assumption that it is an honest and well-meaning organisation, and its directors and shareholders upstanding members of the community. But the way I see it is that a company that has over the years been involved in a number of controversial incidents, that appears to have a less than full commitment to open access, and which has boycotted a journalist simply for posing ownership questions, is now asking that journalist (by proxy, via LJ) to endorse it – which is what I feel I would be doing were I to accept LJ’s invitation to feature on a Dove Press-sponsored web site. I hope readers can understand why I do not wish to do that.  

What does also surprise me is that LJ did not ask me to explain why I feel uncomfortable about accepting its invitation, and the managing editor did not respond to my enquiry about its Dove Press-sponsored Open Access in Action website. 

The OA Interviews: Kamila Markram, CEO and Co-Founder of Frontiers

Based in Switzerland, the open access publisher Frontiers was founded in 2007 by Kamila and Henry Markram, who are both neuroscientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. Henry Markram is also director of the Human Brain Project.

 

Kamila Markram

A researcher-led initiative envisaged as being “by scientists, for scientists” the mission of Frontiers was to create a “community-oriented open access scholarly publisher and social networking platform for researchers.”

To this end, Frontiers has been innovative in a number of ways, most notably with its “collaborative peer review process”. This abjures the traditional hierarchical approach to editorial decisions in favour of reaching “consensual” outcomes. In addition, papers are judged in an “impact-neutral” way: while expected to meet an objective threshold before being publicly validated as a correct scientific contribution, their significance and impact are not assessed.

Frontiers has also experimented with a variety of novel publication formats, created Loop – a “research network” intended to foster and support open science – and pioneered altmetrics before the term had been coined.

Two other important components of the Frontiers’ concept were that it would operate on a non-profit basis (via the Frontiers Research Foundation), and that while it would initially levy article-processing charges (APCs) for publishing papers, this would subsequently be replaced by a sponsored funding model.

This latter goal has yet to be realised. “We dreamed of a zero-cost model, which was probably too idealistic and it was obviously not possible to start that way”, says Kamila Markram below.

Frontiers also quickly concluded that its non-profit status would not allow it to achieve its goals. “We realised early on that we would need more funds to make the vision sustainable and it would not be possible to secure these funds through purely philanthropic means,” explains Markram.

Consequently, in 2008 Frontiers reinvented itself as a for-profit publisher called Frontiers Media SA. It also began looking for additional sources of revenue, including patent royalties – seeking, for instance, to patent its peer review process by means of a controversial business method patent.

The patent strategy was also short-lived. “We abandoned the patent application by not taking any action by the specific deadline given by the patent office and deliberately let it die,” says Markram, adding, “we soon realised that it is far better just to keep innovating than waste one’s time on a patent.” (Henry Markram nevertheless remains an active patent applicant).

By the time the peer review patent had died it was in any case apparent that Frontiers’ pay-to-publish model was working well. In fact, business was booming, and to date Frontiers has published around 41,000 papers by 120,000 authors. It has also recruited 59,000 editors, and currently publishes 54 journals. By 2011 the company had turned “cash positive” (five years after it was founded).

Successes not unnoticed

Frontier’ successes did not go unnoticed. Not only did it quickly gain mindshare amongst researchers, but it began to attract the attention of publishers, not least Nature Publishing Group (NPG), which in February 2013 announced that was entering into a relationship with Frontiers.

The exact nature of this relationship was, however, somewhat elusive. In its press release Nature described it as a “strategic alliance”. An associated news item in Naturereported that Frontiers had been “snapped up” by NPG, which was taking a “majority investment” in the company.

A post on the Frontiers web site also talked of NPG taking a “majority investment”, and quoted an approving Philip Campbell (Nature’s Editor-in-Chief) saying, “Frontiers is innovating in many ways that are of interest to us and to the scientific community”.  

In reality it was Holtzbrinck Publishing Groupthat had invested in Frontiers, not NPG, although Holtzbrinck was the owner of Macmillan Science and Education (and thus of NPG).

It was also unclear as to whether the money that Holtzbrinck had invested in Frontiers could be described as a “majority investment”. Speaking to Science in 2015, Frontier’s Executive Editor Frederick Fenter described it rather as a “minority share”.

Either way, the precarious nature of Frontier’s relationship with Nature became all too evident in January 2015, when it was announced that Macmillan Science and Education (along with NPG) was merging with German science publisher Springer. There was no mention of Frontiers, and the situation was only clarified when Macmillan posted a tweet in response to the enquiries it was receiving about the status of Frontiers.

Looking back, it would appear the much-lauded relationship between NPG and Frontiers was more wish fulfilment than substance – encapsulated perhaps by a glossy 7-minute video produced at the time that (amongst other things) includes a clip of the CEO of Macmillan Science and Education (and former MD of NPG) Annette Thomas welcoming Frontiers to Macmillan’s office in London, lauding its achievements and promise, but failing to specify what exactly Nature planned to do with Frontiers.

The true state of affairs does not appear to have been publicly acknowledged until the 2015 Science article cited above. When asked to clarify the situation Fenter replied: “We made the decision about 6 months ago to make a clean separation and never to mention again that [NPG] has some kind of involvement in Frontiers.”

Critics

Like most successful open access publishers Frontiers has attracted controversy along the way. There have been complaints, for instance, about its peer review process (including an oft-repeated claim that its editorial system does not allow papers to be rejected), complaints about the level of “spam” it bombards researchers with, and complaints that its mode of operating is inappropriately similar to the one used by multi-level marketing company Amway. (By, for instance, requiring editors to recruit further editors within a pyramidal editorial and journal structure, setting editors targets for the number of papers they have to publish in their journal each year, and requiring that they themselves publish in the journal).

There have also been complaints about the way that Frontiers promotes itself on its blog. Its posts have attracted considerable attention (including from high-profile media outlets like the Times Higher) but critics argue that while its contributions tend to be presented as research the data is cherry-picked in a self-serving way. See, for instance, here, here, here, here, and here.

In addition, Frontiers has attracted criticism for publishing a number of controversial papers (see here and here for instance), and in 2014 it was accused of caving in to specious libel threats by retracting a legitimate paper. The latter led to Frontiers’ associate editor Björn Brembs publicly resigning.

A number of other prominent researchers have publicly criticised Frontiers too. In June, for instance, a blog critique was posted by Dorothy Bishop, Professor of Developmental Neuropsychology at the University of Oxford, and another one a month later by Melissa Terras, Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of Information Studies at University College London (UCL).

More recently, in January, Micah Allen, a Cognitive neuroscientist at UCL, rehearsed the various complaints against Frontiers in a blog post entitled “Is Frontiers in Trouble”.

But the most controversial incident occurred last May, when Frontiers sacked 31 editors amid a row over independence. The editors complained that Frontiers’ publication practices are designed to maximise the company's profits, not the quality of papers, and that this could harm patients.

The wave of criticism reached a peak last October when Jeffrey Beall added Frontiers to his list of “potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers”.

Supporters

On the other hand, Frontiers has no shortage of fans and supporters, not least amongst its army of editors and authors. It has also received public support from a number of industry organisations.

In a statement posted on its web site last year, for instance, the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) said, “We note that there have been vigorous discussions about, and some editors are uncomfortable with, the editorial processes at Frontiers. However, the processes are declared clearly on the publisher's site and we do not believe there is any attempt to deceive either editors or authors about these processes. Publishing is evolving rapidly and new models are being tried out. At this point we have no concerns about Frontiers being a COPE member and are happy to work with them as they explore these new models.”

And in response to questions being askedabout the role that Frontiers’ journal manager Mirjam Curno plays at COPE the statement added, “Frontiers has been a member of COPE since January 2015. In the interests of complete transparency, we note here also that one of the Frontiers staff, Mirjam Curno, is a member of COPE council – a position she was elected to when she was employed at the Journal of the International AIDS Society in 2012 and which continued (with the agreement of the COPE Council and on becoming an Associate Member of COPE) after she moved to Frontiers; she is now also a trustee of COPE.”

Around the same time the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) published this comment: “We are aware that concerns have recently been expressed about the publisher Frontiers, which is a member of OASPA. We have discussed the situation with Frontiers, who have been very responsive in providing us with information on their editorial processes and explaining their procedures. In light of these responses, the Membership Committee remains fully satisfied that Frontiers meets the requirements for membership of OASPA.”

(We could note in passing that Frontiers’ Executive Editor Frederick Fenter was a candidate for OASPA’s Board in 2015).

As will perhaps be evident, a central focus for the complaints about Frontiers are its editorial processes, including the claim that its online system does not allow papers to be rejected. Markram agrees that there has been some confusion over this. While insisting that reviewers have always been able to reject papers, she acknowledges below that feedback indicated “it was not clear to them how to recommend a manuscript for rejection to the handling Editor.”

This issue, she says, has now been addressed. “Based on the feedback we have now renamed this option withdraw from review/recommend rejection, and the reasons, which reviewers can choose from to indicate why, have also been split accordingly.”

Daniel Lakens, an assistant professor at Eindhoven University of Technology, has experienced Frontiers as author, reviewer and editor. He has published several papers, and was for two years an associate editor for Frontiers in Cognition, resigning last month due to a lack of time. He continues to act as a reviewer.

Lakens suspects that much of the criticism comes from researchers who have failed to understand, or are not comfortable with, Frontiers’ distinctive peer review process.

“The review process itself is much more collaborative. This is a good thing if you find good reviewers willing to invest time in improving manuscripts. Forcing scientist to enter a discussion, and respond to arguments from the other side, leads to bigger improvements in manuscripts than at traditional journals, in my opinion. But it really depends on the mind-set of the reviewers and authors.”

The other important difference, he says, is Frontiers’ commitment to publishing methodologically sound research, regardless of significance levels or novelty.

“Publication bias is probably the biggest challenge that modern science faces. I think it is important that Frontiers takes a responsibility in publishing all sound research. Some reviewers, more used to traditional journals, just want to reject papers they don’t like. For example, this happened when I submitted my own article to Frontiers, where a reviewer thought there was nothing novel in my explanation of effect sizes, and withdrew from the revision process. It would have been better if this reviewer had instead provided some suggestions to improve it (which was no doubt possible), because the rather substantial interest in the article (it has been cited 200+ times) suggests his judgment about the novelty of the paper seems to have been irrelevant.”

Lakens is also sceptical about claims that it is not possible to reject papers. “Every manuscript I wanted to reject as a Frontiers editor has been rejected.”

Radical when it started

Lakens adds: “Frontiers was radical when it started and paved the way for even more radical open access journals. The collaborative review process is still in many ways novel and, very often, an improvement over the traditional peer review process. But now we see even more innovative journals than Frontiers emerging. One example is PeerJ, which greatly reduces the cost of open access publishing, and also embraces open reviews.”

In truth, impact-neutral reviewing was pioneeredby PLOS ONE in 2006, a year before Frontiers appeared on the scene. But implicit in Lakens’ statement, I think, is a belief that while it has played an important part in promoting new types of peer review, Frontiers now faces competition from younger, more innovative, and less expensive publishers like PeerJ and F1000Research.

It clearly will not help that Beall has added Frontiers to his list, which Lakens believes could encourage researchers to shun the publisher. “Many scientists are sensitive to prestige, and if these researchers would not be able to evaluate the quality of science themselves, they might think twice about submitting to Frontiers, although I would hope this group is rather small.”

Beall, of course, is himself a controversial figure, and his list is widely criticised by open access advocates. “I think Beall’s list is not transparent,” says Lakens. “Inclusions are not justified, and occur on the basis of the personal opinion of a single individual. The scientific community should ignore Beall’s list, and pay more attention to the Directory of Open Access Journals(although no list will be perfect). I think Frontiers should take valid criticisms seriously, because in science, there is always room for improvement, but I don’t think Beall’s list falls on the category of ‘valid criticism’.”

It is indeed remarkable that the decisions of a lone librarian sitting in a Colorado library could have a significant (and global) impact on a publisher. Only too aware of this, in December Frontiers dispatched Fenter and Curno to Colorado to meet with Beall and try and persuade him to take Frontiers back off his list – apparently without success.

Underlying all this, of course, is the fact that the emergence of the Internet has triggered manifold controversies within the research community. Above all, it has plunged scholarly communication into a period of considerable upheaval, and put inherited ways of doing things under growing pressure, not least traditional peer review. The cost of publishing research papers is a further source of often bitter disagreement – and open access publishing has amplified both issues.

A key question here seems to be how publishers find an appropriate role for themselves in the emerging new landscape. In the Q&A below Markram says that “dumping all content on the Internet, unchecked, in multiple versions of readiness, and as cheaply as possible, is not a service to anyone”.

Many, if not most, would doubtless agree with this, which would seem to imply a continuing gatekeeping role for publishers. But who these publishers should be, exactly what kind of service they should provide, and what they should charge for that service remains unresolved.

On the issue of costs, Markram asserts that under the traditional subscription system it costs $7,000 to publish an article, a figure she says that OA publishers have reduced to around $2,000, and Frontiers to just $1,100.

I am sure many would challenge these figures, but I will finish with two (rhetorical) questions: First (leaving aside the issue of whether pedestrian papers written solely in order to bulk up CVs should in fact be formally published), if the average rejection rate at Frontiers is (as Markram says below) just 19% (i.e. 81% are accepted), and if some of those articles turn out not even to have met Frontiers’ lower threshold  for publication (As Markram points it, “no peer-review is bullet-proof, so problematic articles regrettably do sometimes get through) then does $1,100 (or $2,000) per paper represent good value for money? Second, how high does the acceptance rate need to go before simply dumping papers on the Internet becomes a logical way for the research community to save itself millions of dollars a year?

To read Markram’s detailed answers please click on the link below. These are in a pdf file preceded by this introduction.

Readers should be aware that the Q&A is long. I have chosen not to edit Kamila Markram’s text and there are some repetitions, but I was keen to allow her to address my questions in her own words, and as fully as she felt to be appropriate. I have, however, made ample use of pull-quotes.

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This interview is published under a Creative Commons licence, so you are free to copy and distribute it as you wish, so long as you credit me as the author, do not alter or transform the text, and do not use it for any commercial purpose.

To read the interview click HERE.